Wind farm Layout planning

The wind fam layout, that is the placement of turbines within the wind farm, significantly affects the amount of energy that will be extracted from the wind. Optimizing the layout therefore has a significant impact on reducing the cost of wind energy.

The wind flow in wind farms is complex due to the wakes produced by the wind turbines. To assess a layout with respect to energy yield, one must compute the resulting flow and energy extraction for many different wind conditions, which prohibits computationally demanding approaches.

In the NORCOWE project, CMR develops a fast and accurate method based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). The method is called model reduction, where the basic idea is to compute new results within a solution space constructed from a relatively small set of CFD simulations generated in advance.

Solutions can be computed for a wind farm within seconds, compared to hours or days for CFD

The method is physically correct in that it solves the non-linear flow equations in a reduced space

The accuracy can be checked by direct comparison with CFD results

The technique can be extended to other application areas

The aim of the work is to help reduce the cost of energy of wind power through better placement of turbines within wind farms and to provide better accuracy in the estimated long-term energy production.